


Goldilocks

by Goonlalagoon



Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax
Genre: F/F, F/M, Soul Bonds Au, grief and broken trust and growing, healing doesn't always mean going back to who you were, references to past canon character deaths, sometimes it means learning to live as who you've become
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 06:48:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11846184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goonlalagoon/pseuds/Goonlalagoon
Summary: The threads looked as though they would slip away from George’s fingers at any moment. They hadn’t used to; once upon a time they had coiled around her left fingertips to merge with the creases of her palms, just like - so far as she’d heard - everybody else’s.- Leagues and Legends soulbonds AU





	Goldilocks

The threads looked as though they would slip away from George’s fingers at any moment. They hadn’t used to; once upon a time they had coiled around her left fingertips to merge with the creases of her palms, just like - so far as she’d heard - everybody else’s. She’d had a fair handful, even if most of those were the ubiquitous gossamer connections she’d barely been able to see, but one or two had been strong enough to see clearly, only fading to invisibility when her closest friends and caretakers were out of the village.

  
They had all disappeared after they left her for the dragon. It hadn’t hurt, except for all of the ways she was already wounded, as those threads snapped and burned away. Soul bonds only formed between humans (at least - were only visible between humans) so for the entirety of the time she dwelt in the dragon’s shadow her hands were free of threads.   
After the dragon was dead, her fingertips stayed stubbornly clear of even the barest connections. George wasn’t certain why, but - dragon blood had splattered over her fingers, burning, and her hands hadn’t felt clean since. Maybe all those questing connections boiled away on that acid stain. Or maybe she just didn’t really stay places long enough for them to form.

  
Maybe she’d stopped trying to link her life to other people’s.

  
Jack was an oddity, an annoyance, a tag along, until the day she realised she was picking out her place to camp for the night expecting there to be two bedrolls laid out not just hers. She almost didn’t believe it when the string first faded into view. She thought _I’m seeing things_. She thought _why is he different?_ She thought _I don’t deserve this, I don’t want -_ , and the tentative thread snapped. Jack, sleeping by the fire,  frowned in his sleep while George stared at her shaking fingers. Soul bonds didn’t work like that. You couldn’t will them into or out of existence. They formed whenever another’s life touched yours, however briefly, growing the closer your lives grew, the greater their impact on you became, until they ere strong enough to see glimpses of.

  
Weeks passed, the bond flickering and fading until eventually it stayed. It didn’t spiral into the creases of her hand like part of her - it was looped and knotted around a finger, as though someone was stubbornly making sure it stayed there this time. Jack grinned with pleased confusion the afternoon it finally settled into place. It had occurred to George to ask what he saw on his end of it, but it was the first time she’d dared ask. He squinted, the way people did when they wanted to see the lines shimmering in the air.

  
“I mean, my end its a pretty thick thread - but when it gets closer to you it goes kind of grey and dark? I’ve never heard of that before. But it’s a patchy grey, now, so you can see glimmers of gold through it.” George rubbed her hands together absently, thinking quietly about how they’d stayed grey for days after she was done burying the people who had left her to die.   
For a long while, Jack’s thread was the only one she had. No matter how close they grew it was never visible when they were more than a room apart. She fidgeted nervously the first time it faded out until Jack came back in, and it strung out between them again.

  
Bea built to a thread, long after Jack could tell that this tough, steady woman was about to enter the room by squinting at his hand. It wrapped around her palm, knotted, a little more like she was grasping onto something than someone had tied it to her. It never grew strong enough to see more than a few feet distant. Neither did Liam’s.

  
Jack knew he was gone when the thread broke. George knew by the set of Jack’s shoulders, by the way Liam was so quiet and still, by the way Jack was staring, horror struck, at his red stained hands. George had stared at her own clean hands that way, once.

  
She could see him walking away long after that string had faded from view. There were still two threads she could see when the living Joneses were close enough to touch, but she tangled her hands in loose thread, wool, her own hair until it left smarting lines around her fingers that she half pretended came from something else. She hadn’t realised how much weight she had given that thread until as soon as it was gone for more than a day she began to doubt every thread she had, to puzzle obsessively over the ones she could never seem to see.

  
It got easier to build those bonds, though they were still things tied and grasped rather than grown, and never stretched far. When asked, once, Bea said they still faded an ashy grey. But they were there. There were people she liked, trusted, allowed to influence her, and maybe that was enough. She knew they were there, and that was enough.   
It didn’t take long for ties to fall into place with Jack’s new friends - because they were her friends too, because they were the kinds of people who changed you - or simply because they were with Jack?

  
She puzzled over it, quietly, and squinted suspiciously at Grey when no one was looking. Some people believed the soul threads meant you could trust the other person implicitly. Some people hadn’t seen all of their ties severed by the hands of those at the other ends of them. Just because this child mattered did not mean he was innocent. Just because he had ties to her people did not mean he wouldn’t hurt them.

  
They all had ties to people they would hurt, wanted to hurt - but few could see them, these more complex  webs, bonds strung out between other people. Most people could only see their own bonds of love and trust, and the occasional strong link to someone else.

  
Jack could see the heavy, ominous rope that led to the Seeress, all the way to the edge of the mountains, and glanced absently at that hollow space whenever old, cold memories threatened to choke him. It knotted itself around George’s wrist, a tightened noose that when they were close enough for her to see it looked as though it should be leaving bruises and scarring welts. Liam’s fingers had twitched over it, and Bea - Bea had woken one morning to an empty bed and a dark coil, and had slowly, steadily built her years of work around that grim anchor.

  
(None of them had ever been foolish enough to think the _real_ threat was the mayor.)

  
Cassandra saw them all - the friendships, the hatreds, the individual strands of each thread that told you what had built it. All but three of the strings on her hand were born from fear or hate. Sam’s was an unconditional love that never wavered. Spider had been careful respect that grew and grew. The third had been the happy, open smile of a boy who hadn’t yet learned that calm girls in an inn speaking of destinies might have cold calculations in their morality. Jack, so young, had not yet stopped trusting everyone he met to be good, so at the core of that tether was a thin thread of easy, cheerful trust.

  
The Seeress could see everyone’s strings, so she saw the way George’s hands burned at them, the way they had to be clung onto, the way they were never more than tentative. If she had felt like being kind, she could have told George that she was not the only one the Seeress had seen who had sould bonds tied not grown - though George was the only person she’d seen with bonds that faded grey and seemed to be trying to crumble as though splashed with something that burns. But the Cassandra Graves was rarely kind. When she met Ana, hands bedecked with knotted threads only the Seeress could see, Cass leaned forwards and hissed about stained, empty hands, revenge for years of conflict this girl no longer remembered.

  
(By the time Cass left the underground lab, she had a thread strung out from her to Rupert strong enough for him to see too. It was rooted in steady disapproval, but built with a precise line between the justice she deserved and what she received, and a patient sympathy that scared her more than all the hatred in her other ties put together. By the time she left Rivertown, she had a tie to Miz Eliza built up from curiosity and kindness. By the time she reached the desert even to her eyes they were faint, but she could see the precise knots on both - things determinedly given and made to last. She still would not have told the Dragon Slayer that she was not alone in this.)

  
Ana Jones noted the way her eyes read words longer than the meanings she could recall, the books she couldn’t remember titles or pages of, the way her fingers absentmindedly skipped over raised, empty spaces on her fingers. Memory crashed back, painless but overwhelming - well, no pain that wasn’t old, familiar, something she had lived with for so long she barely remembered to notice it any more. There were knots looping around her fingers where there had moments before been empty air that had caught her absent attention.

  
She teamed up with Jill, as the dust settled, with Laney and Rupert, to track down all of Jill’s rescues and escapees that they could find. She was there because she wanted to be; she was there because George understood, better than any of them, what it was to walk in the long shadow of your choices. When they had found the last - the first - rescued mage’s family, Jill dragged George out into the open air in search of market stalls. George followed, smiling, and ran gentle fingers over the thread that flickered into view, looped around her palm like something grasped, something she had chosen to hold on to.

  
Nearly all of the time it couldn’t be seen, but she had lived with that for a lifetime. George was long, hard years from the time when she could judge the strength of her ties by their visibility. She was long, hard years from the time no longer seeing that link made her feel like maybe there was no longer someone waiting on the other end. She was long, long years from the days when the lack of stings felt right, because maybe she didn’t really _deserve_ to have people tied to her anyway, because if you didn’t try to cling onto people you couldn’t be hurt when they let go of you. George ran absent fingers over the knuckles of her left fingers, the creased palm, the knots and loops she couldn’t see, as she trekked into hills and valleys and ridges in search of dragons. She didn’t breathe a sigh of relief when she came home to the little cottage she and Jill shared, looked after when they were both away by a friendly neighbour, and found that string still firmly there. George only formed soul bonds with people she trusted to stay in her life so long as they had the choice.

  
Jill had a scientist’s fascination in this as in everything, a calm patience and frantic curiosity. She peered at the ash grey of George’s threads, sketched the knots and tracked their complexity over time, person by person, soul by soul. She collected stories, anecdotes, pulled out the obscure texts hidden in University libraries that Grey had babbled excitedly about until George’s lack of response and Jack’s pained grimaces broke through the the shell of academia. Jill was better at politeness, empathy, and knowing how to not make this seem like George was an interesting test subject than Grey had been. She’d had a lot of practice, George supposed, and it helped that this wasn’t literally the first conversation they ever had.

  
Laney looked at the sketched knots with professional interest, naming them and in some cases trying to figure out how you would tie them. Sez skimmed a curious eye over them as well, but shrugged and said she had her system sorted. She could see her threads clearly - but only her mother could see the other end of hers. They tinged purple, she mentioned in a casual pause on conversation, and George ran an absent thumb over the creases of her own palm, breath catching. So far as anyone knew, soul bonds only formed between humans - everyone said so - everyone _knew_ \- but Sez had purple threads twining around her half monster fingers. When asked, cautious, if he had them too, John nodded absently, preoccupied with cooking supper and keeping an eye on a couple of kids playing a little too close to the fire. George made careful notes, and wondered about the dragon as she put them in order for writing up at a later date.

  
On dark nights when old, cold things rustled in the back of her head she  traced the invisible strings and shivered to herself. Would it make it worse, if that terrible, beautiful beast had been in the centre of its own web of connections, shattering at her hands? Or better, somehow, Jack’s long held stance that if a creature is capable of understanding then it should also have been capable of restraint and reason? She wondered about what heavy tether may have been strung out, unseen, across that valley before she stole a spear and shattered it for the sake of other people’s peace.   
On dark nights, she breathed deep and pressed up against Jill’s warm shoulder. When she was still just a child, really, someone had handed her a knife and let her choose what to do with it. Golden strings had snapped, shattered, burned; an invisible anchor had been cut free (and dragged her back ever since). Trust would never again come easy to her. Her loyalties would always be something held inside of herself, not written out into the air, but she had lived with that for years. It was enough.  
  
 _I’m glad that you used it on the ropes_ echoed in the quiet of her mind.  
“Me, too” George whispered back, and meant every aching part of it.


End file.
